Are you up to the digital challenge?

In the first of a new series of blogs and related downloadable Business Briefs, Jon Laycock (Technical Account Manager within the Arrow Dell EMC team), explores how you can help your customers address the need for digital transformation, whilst keeping costs under control.

One of the most pressing issues and biggest challenges facing your customers today is how they can embrace digital transformation to gain and retain a competitive advantage. In fact, IDC forecasts that by 2018, 45% of CIOs will have shifted their primary focus from physical to digital in order to deliver the scale, predictability and speed that their business demands.

So the question is, how can you take advantage of this opportunity - helping your customers to transform their existing IT environments in support of big data analytics, social and mobile initiatives?

Hybrid cloud strategies are proving the answer for a growing number of organisations and according to a Market Forecast Report for the Worldwide Hybrid Cloud Computing Market from 2016 to 2022, nearly 82% of enterprises will have a hybrid cloud strategy in place for 2018, with more than 60% of large enterprises planning to implement hybrid clouds by 2020.

Make Cloud Your Flexible Friend

IT teams are under increasing pressure to ensure they have an effective and flexible cloud strategy in place, but the biggest question for most organisations is where and how to get started? This is where the Dell EMC solutions portfolio really delivers, having embraced the need for choice across different cloud consumption models.

Expose the hidden costs

Your customers will always be keen to protect their existing investments, however legacy IT infrastructure is not only expensive and time consuming to maintain, but slow and inflexible when it comes to delivering new IT services. Consolidating legacy systems into converged infrastructure solutions such as Dell EMC’s Vblock and VxBlock solutions will give them a more agile, reliable and cost effective IT environment - the perfect platform for building a flexible cloud strategy that will drive business innovation.

Traditional SAN and NAS storage platforms were never designed for the demands of cloud applications and big data volumes that are inevitable in today’s digital world. A simpler and more cost-effective storage architecture is needed, whilst maintaining the same high standards of reliability, performance and security. Software-defined object storage, such as Dell EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage, provides the answer to this challenge – making it straightforward and cost-effective to support the new demands for mobile, cloud, big data and social applications, without exposing the business to unnecessary risk.

Take the hybrid road

To help protect their existing storage investments, cloud tiering solutions such as Data Domain and Cloud Array will ensure that they can connect seamlessly from on-premise SAN and NAS storage solutions to pay-as-you-go public cloud storage – combining the performance and security of local storage with the massive scale and lower cost of the cloud.

For those customers that have already invested in, or plan to taken advantage of, public cloud solutions such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps or SalesForce, the key challenge will be to ensure that they’re still in control when it comes to protecting data for business continuity and compliance. This is where Dell EMC’s Spanning solutions come into play, delivering trusted and reliable backup and recovery for SaaS applications.

Get straight to the heart of the matter with Arrow

To help you work with your customers to build a strong business case for adopting a flexible, hybrid cloud approach to their future IT requirements, the Arrow Dell EMC team has produced a customer-facing Business Brief that you can share and discuss to help start the conversation.

Whether you need to draw on our team of technical and solution specialists to help develop a customer’s cloud strategy, work with our business development team to build a strong proposition, or generate new opportunities by working with our marketing specialists, Arrow offers a level of support and experience that’s unsurpassed in the channel.

About Arrow

Arrow is a global supply channel partner to over 100,000 original equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers, and commercial customers, in sectors ranging from aerospace to automotive, telecommunications to transportation.

Arrow’s contribution feeds into everything these companies produce, from cars to coffee makers to cable boxes. Consequently, Arrow touches everyday life for individuals across the world, at least twenty times a day on average.

Arrow is a Fortune 150 company and recognised as one of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies. Arrow operates in over 460 locations in 56 countries, with 18,500 employees serving 100,000 customers worldwide. Here in the UK and Ireland, we have over 600 employees working out of seven locations.